Tea Party Nation: Hold Your Horses — We’ve Got Some Other Questions About Obama’s ‘Eligibility’

Judson Phillips, leader of Tea Party Nation.
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Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, says that it’s all well and good that President Obama has released his long-form birth certificate, but there are still several other questions about his “eligibility” and background that need answering. Among them: Why won’t the President release his school records, and is he hiding the fact that he was on a foreign student scholarship?

In an interview with TPM, Phillips said that he’s “glad” the President released the birth certificate, but he thinks that’s just one part of the greater issue of his “eligibility.” The new question? Whether President Obama is a natural-born citizen since his father was a British subject in Kenya. Another? Whether the President lost his citizenship when he was supposedly adopted by his Indonesian stepfather.

TPM SLIDESHOW: There’s The Birth Certificate: TPM’s Best Of The Birthers

The first claim seems to have mutated from the theory that Obama is ineligible because his father is Kenyan and therefore the President has dual citizenship. Factcheck.org debunked this long ago, pointing out that Obama automatically lost any claim to Kenyan citizenship when he turned 23. As for the second claim, FactCheck points out that U.S. statute specifies that someone would have to be over 18 to lose their citizenship for that of another country, and Obama was six at the time the supposed adoption took place.

But color Phillips unconvinced. For one thing, “certainly a great deal of time and effort has been expended to keep [the birth certificate] secret, and the question he asks is: ‘Why?'”

For another, Phillips wondered, why won’t the President release his records from college? “I have found it very disturbing that president Obama has not released all his records,” he told TPM, noting that there’s a “rumor that Obama attended Occidental [College] on a scholarship reserved for foreign students.”

That rumor seems to have originated from a chain e-mail based on a fake AP story.

Though Phillips said these are all important questions, he stipulated: “I’m a little bit more concerned about his attorney disciplinary record. That’s certainly a whole lot more recent than the grades.”

On the Tea Party Nation site, Phillips wrote on Wednesday that the Obama candidacy “could be mortally wounded if some of the other records reveal embarrassing things.”

“The Democrats may actually want this to happen,” he continued. “As gas prices rise and so does inflation, the chances of an Obama second term diminish. If something happened and the Democrats could replace Obama with someone else (Hillary Clinton?), that candidate could run against the Obama record as well as the Republicans, giving them a shot at keeping at least the White House in Democratic hands.”

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